He presses his lips together. ‘I have a mutation that makes me respond strongly to neural gentech.’
‘What, like memory blockers?’
‘No, like real neural gentech. Code that runs inside the brain.’
‘I thought we were still decades away from that kind of tech.’
‘Well, I guess Lachlan was just ahead of his time.’
‘Wow.’ I lean back, watching the rain bounce off the windshield. Code that can affect people’s brains has been the obsession of conspiracy theorists since panels were invented. They figured that if you could change people’s skin, you could also change their minds, which meant our thoughts could someday be controlled.
But after years of work and countless primate tests, scientists explained that it was just too hard.
The problem is, the brain isn’t like any other organ. Our thoughts and memories are stored as billions of tiny circuits, which means it’s the structures of the cells that are important, not just the cells themselves. It’s the way they’re organized, the way they link up to one another. The rest of the body is far easier: if you tweak the gene for melanin, then your freckles fade. You want bigger muscles? Just grow some more muscle cells. Most gentech apps are as simple as that. The art of coding lies in finding the safest, most elegant way to do those tiny tweaks.
But the brain is a mass of billions of neurons, and their structure is unique to every person. If you wanted to change someone’s brain, you’d need to map it first, and we can’t even do that. Mapping every neuron is a task that’s just as hard as building a brand-new brain, and I didn’t think we were even close to doing that.
‘So what are you saying?’ I ask. ‘Do you have code controlling your thoughts?’
Cole laughs. It’s a deep, full laugh, and the sound is jarring after the tense silence that’s stretched between us for the last few hours. ‘No, it’s not like that.’
‘What is it, then?’ I shift, angling myself towards him, moving my wounded knee carefully. ‘Is there code for neural restructuring? How do they handle the computation?’
‘There’s no thought control,’ Cole says. ‘Nothing like that. It’s pretty blunt. It started when Lachlan tweaked the unmapped parts of my genome and noticed some changes in my behaviour.’
I close my eyes, trying not to think about the risk my father took using code that focused on the unmapped parts of Cole’s DNA. It could have killed him. It could have driven him insane. It’s the genetic equivalent of testing random chemicals by feeding them to a child.
‘So what did he find?’
Cole looks over at me, and for the first time since we started driving, we hold each other’s gaze. ‘Tell me why you jacked into your knee to close those airlocks.’
I run my fingers across the bandage on my leg. ‘It seemed like the right thing to do.’
‘Did you think about it for a while, and weigh up the pros and cons? Or were you following an instinct?’
I think back to Homestake, to when I jammed the wire into my knee before I could hesitate, to stop myself from backing out. ‘I guess it was mostly an instinct.’
He nods. ‘You wanted to protect the people in that bunker. That’s instinctive, Cat, and it’s as deep as it gets. Protecting others is a universal instinct, and it can be overwhelming when it kicks in. We’re all born with it, which means that it’s coded somewhere in our DNA. Our conscious thoughts and memories are built up throughout our lives, but instincts are different. Instincts are genetic. And that makes them susceptible to coding.’
I chew my lip as I start to see what Cole is getting at. If our instincts are genetic, one day we might be able to rewrite them. But first we’d need to find the genes that control our instincts, which could be impossible. Even knockout kids could only take you so far. If a child was afraid of the dark, would that be because of a hard-coded instinct, or because they’d had experiences that made them afraid? Splitting apart the influence of genes and experiences on our personalities – nature versus nurture – has been a problem in science for centuries.
‘So your protective protocol, is that an instinct?’
Cole nods. ‘Protection was the first instinct Lachlan noticed in me. He activated one of my genes with a piece of code when I was eight years old, and I tackled a nurse who was trying to sample Jun Bei’s blood. The code didn’t change anyone else’s behaviour, but it made my brain light up like a firework. He figured out that if he tweaked genes that were associated with instincts in me, I would feel those instincts in response. He activated a set of genes in the cells inside my brain, and I was suddenly afraid of water. He deactivated them, and the fear disappeared. It didn’t work on anyone else, but for me it was like flipping a switch. He could make me feel fear, or protectiveness, all by running a few lines of code.’
‘Remotely controlled instincts.’ My head spins. ‘That’s incredible. But … that means he could use you to build a map, to figure out which genes controlled which instincts. Nobody’s been able to do that before. You’re like the Rosetta stone for the human brain.’
A brief, unreadable look crosses Cole’s face, like a cloud drifting over the sun. ‘That’s exactly what he used to call me. He mapped out hundreds of instincts in my DNA, everything from protectiveness to cravings for sugar. The urge to hunt, to kill …’
It suddenly hits me. ‘He made you feel all those things? But how did he test them? You were a child, you couldn’t explain what you were feeling properly, and he’d have to test them in different settings, with different environments, different strengths. He’d have to make sure you weren’t faking …’
Cole drops his eyes.
‘He made you kill people, when you were just a child?’
He nods. I stare at him for a long moment, then force my eyes away. A tear drops from my nose before I know I’m crying, and I bite down on my lip, trying to hold it in.
‘Cat, please don’t cry. It was a long time ago. I’ve dealt with it.’
‘But it was wrong,’ I say. My voice is thick, and the effort of keeping it level hurts my throat. ‘He was my father, and you were a child. He treated you like lab rats when he should have been looking after you.’
‘If it wasn’t him, it would have been someone else. Maybe a few years later, maybe decades, but it was inevitable.’
‘No,’ I whisper, though I know he’s right. If my father hadn’t done it, another scientist would have eventually. That’s the problem with animal testing. It’s so easy that it becomes the only thing people know how to do. When they learn all they can from rats, there’s only one way to move on – to rabbits, dogs, monkeys, bonobos. It was inevitable they’d turn to humans.
But that’s still no excuse for what my father did.